This physician had recently started a new job when the pandemic hit.
The safety measures put in place at work enabled her to have an extended maternity leave to spend time with one young daughter and her baby daughter born that summer.
Still, the year had many challenges with so many changes at once in the midst of the pandemic.
As a Black woman, she faced additional challenges related to ongoing racial violence in the U.S. and how so many of her well-meaning colleagues at work reacted to this racism. She saw herself as having grown tremendously during that year — both in actions she took herself as well as her renewed reliance on her strong network of other Black women.
She wanted her poem to cement how much struggle she had overcome that year and to also serve as a role model for her daughters.
Listener Poet Yvette Perry
Association of American Medical Colleges
March 2021
To My Daughters, Who Will Need to Know
One day, you’ll want to know how I came to
be so strong and you will need to know:
I grew into this woman
You’ll need to know how hard it was this
past year for me to start a new job,
to be a new mother of two
Running fast, I hit a brick wall
A new virus made the wall harder
The old virus made it harder still
Even though that summer my inbox at work
overflowed with their words of
solidarity, after a while when I’d say
8 minutes 46 seconds they’d be confused
or when I’d say Say her name
they’d wonder Whose?
You’ll need to know that when I
hit that brick wall, I did not fall,
I leaned back into arms of sister-friends
I learned to slow myself down, inhale
good moments, extend grace unto myself
I learned to reject the legacy of
so many women before me who had
learned to build walls that were
hindrances to their own happiness
I see, my Beloveds, me reflected in you:
strong Black woman I grew into,
unbreakable not despite, but
because of my vulnerability
I know one day you’ll need to know so that
when you come to your own brick walls you can
find the doors and walk through
Every day, I try to see through the patient lens, and I ask: what can we do to change this broken system?
She was very proud of her daughter and has hopes for “a bright future that’s as pain free as possible”
“I’m trying to focus on doing little things to make people feel better during everything that’s going on in the world,” she told me.
“It’s hard to see others struggle,” she said. “How can I help with their struggle without struggling myself?”
"I'd tell her it's OK to be loud...it's OK to challenge and to bring all of you into these spaces where no one looks like you..."
“I'm continuously questioning: did I do it right?" she said. "I’ve always done a good amount of second-guessing, but I’m re-learning how to show up differently.”
“It’s weird,” she said. “This is one of the biggest accomplishments of my life, but it doesn’t feel like it.”
"It changed me; It changed the way I look at life," said this woman about her profound experience during her pregnancy.
“It’s been more challenging than normal lately,” she said. “I’m only one person. It's a struggle for me to say no, but I can’t do everything that’s being asked of me right now.”
"I've been processing how to make the most of the small amount of life we have to live," said this physician.
"I've been processing how to make the most of the small amount of life we have to live," said this physician.
“I like feeling small,” he told me. “Nature has always made me feel small.” He described the sense of wonder that feeling gave him.
“I feel like I have decision fatigue,” she told me. It was normal for her to make many choices at work, but COVID had dramatically increased the number of medical decisions she had to make at home.
“I know ‘vibe’ is kind of a nonspecific term, but I think about people’s vibes all the time,” he said.“ Sometimes you come into a room and it’s just off.
This physician discussed being the only one in his practice network with expertise in patients with a specific type of chronic pain.
“Our constituents are uniquely affected by the pandemic,” they said. This poemee was an educational psychologist who spoke about how much they missed working in person with med students, healthcare staff, and medical educators.
"I grew from the experience – though I think it aged me 10 years!" This is how a resident described a turning point with a specific patient when he recognized how burned out he was.
Although he had been through many stressful experiences in his life and recently, he always held onto his positive outlook. He took particular care to use words intentionally, paying attention to their connotations, so that his positivity extended to those that he interacted with as well.
“There’s a constant feeling inside that I should be doing more,” she said. “But I also want to be kind to myself and recognize all that I’ve given.”
These members of the Wellness team in the Department of Neurology at the University of Colorado each spoke about the importance of community and connection.
She said she wanted a poem about the importance of CPR. As both a nurse and a CPR instructor, she spoke about how the rhythms of certain familiar songs helped her students internalize the rate of compression required.
He brought the tools of mindfulness and self-care to medical students, many of whom had been studying all this past year, 10 hours a day, day after day, in isolation.
The pandemic had forced this woman to slow her life down drastically. Before, she’d travelled around every month for work, never stopping, working hard because she cared about her job. The slower pace created by social distancing had reminded her to cherish everything that life had to offer outside of work.
He had recently lost his father to COVID-19 and was reflecting on forgiveness. For the majority of his life with his father, they did not have a positive relationship. However, in the last three years of life, his father lost his memory and his personality changed into someone who was loving and kind.